Are “Like” and “Share” buttons must-haves, or are there other ways to promote your social media presence on WordPress?

I’ve had something of an “on-off” relationship with the “Like” button… When it and the “Tweetmeme” buttons hit the scene a year or so back we all rushed to populate our sites with them.

This is great for bloggers and “entrepreneurs” (note deliberate use of quote marks) as it facilitates interaction and sharing.

Recently I’ve found a useful plug-in that better serves my purpose.

My personal strategy online is to promote a real physical product… ME! – I sell my time working as an entertainer or coach.

I am becoming less convinced about the overuse of “like” and “Share” buttons for what I do – Thankfully I have found another tool!

Over-filling a “website” with buttons can be counter productive. There’s a risk of making your site seem cluttered, your page formatting can go astray and less experienced visitors may be directed away from your site (if they have to log in to Twitter/Facebook etc).

I use WordPress as a CMS for my websites. I use blogs. Not to generate huge amounts of traffic or discussion, but to give me a way to create content for SEO and to build and maintain my real-life reputation.

Your social media presence should no longer (be and never should have been ) considered as separate or distinct from your traditional web or off-line marketing… It should be integrated and appear part of the whole – this is especially relevant for business such as mine which go beyond being simply “On-Line”

I’ve stumbled upon a great little plug-in that allows you to neatly, concisely and easily promote your social accounts. This is not a “share” or “like” widget, save those for your blog pages, IF you think they will add value.

The ‘Social Media Widget’ by Brian Freytag is easy to set up, supports dozens of different media links as standard and even allows you to create your own and import other icon sets…

It displays neatly, cleanly with the option of some natty animated icons.

In summary – integrating social media account on your website is a must… Think about your own objectives and find a way to do it that enhances, not clutters, your pages.

Marc

A great guest post from Public Speaking Coach and Presenter, Marc Lemezma, who we’ve worked with for a couple of years now as he really gets to grips with WordPress. He’s definitely on the “if you ever want a job” list.

Chatting with a designer colleague last week, he wanted to explore just how useful WordPress can be in bringing together the various aspects of social media these days. How can the power of WordPress be harnessed with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and goodness knows how much more?

Perhaps the most immediately obvious channel that WordPress can include is Twitter – not only by encouraging us to “tweet this” but also showing us a feed of tweets (hopefully relevant!), encouraging visitors to “follow me”, and more. And now with Facebook joining in, we can show that we “like” a blog post to all of our friends and connections – sharing our information with those that are happy keeping their social media within the one place.

And then there are our favourite online networks, forums and the link – YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, 4Networking, Ecademy – there are many to suit our myriad profiles.

The leap from LinkedIn to Facebook is not going to suit everyone, so by including both on your blog – using your blog as the central hub – you appeal to your wider audience. Give your readers what they want – some like Facebook, others like LinkedIn, some will only see your YouTube video if you include it elsewhere, and Twitter – which some of us love and others cannot see the point.

Use your WordPress blog as the hub and that way:

you can be sure of owning the content

bring together comments,

update each of the online platforms you use

benefit from the activity for your website (rather than someone else’s!)

The thing to do is indeed make use of the forums and platforms, but bring it “home” so that your blog and website gets the benefit too.